By Carol Grisanti and Mushtaq Yusufzai, NBC News, Pakistan
The Taliban may have scored a big propaganda victory again. They appear to have kidnapped the Pakistani Ambassador to Afghanistan, Tariq Azizuddin, Pakistani officials tell NBC News.
The Ambassador has been missing for nearly two days, and officials presume that he was kidnapped in Khyber, one of the seven lawless tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. His car was recovered in Zakhakhel, a village in the Tirah Valley of the Khyber Agency, where the mountains are high and the roads are few. Only the locals and the professional smugglers know the well-worn footpaths that lead through the valley and over the mountains into Afghanistan.
Ambassador Azizuddin left his home in Peshawar around 10am Monday morning with his driver and one bodyguard, for the five-hour drive back to Kabul, local officials tell NBC. This was his normal procedure, they say. He travelled back and forth frequently using the fabled Khyber Pass, the main road link between Pakistan and Afghanistan, stopping at the border town of Torkham to change cars and cross over. He never informed the local authorities of his plans and apparently felt safe.
By 11:00am, Ambassador Azizuddin’s staff, waiting on the other side of the border, tried calling him to ask his whereabouts, according to a spokesman at the Pakistani Embassy in Kabul. His phone was dead. That’s when alarm bells sounded.
“He has gone missing, we are confirming he is missing and the search is on. We have nothing further to say at this time,” Pakistan’s Foreign Office spokesman Mohammed Sadiq told NBC News.
Some local observers speculate that the Ambassador’s kidnapping is in retaliation for the capture of Taliban commander Mullah Mansour Dadullah and other militants in a shootout with Pakistani security forces on Monday-the same day the Ambassador went missing. Mullah Dadullah was arrested in Balouchistan Province, along the border with Afghanistan, and brought to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, for interrogation. Did he or his comrades somehow give the order to capture the Ambassador? Many local officials already are convinced that there can be no other explanation.
But in a country never short on conspiracy theories and deliberate disinformation campaigns, the truth is so far elusive. A Taliban spokesman so far will neither confirm nor deny to NBC News that his militants are responsible for the kidnapping.
The Pakistani government has sealed the borders of the Khyber Agency, closing off all entry and exit points to try to prevent the militants from taking the Ambassador into another adjacent tribal area or across the border into Afghanistan.
A senior intelligence official working in the tribal areas told NBC News that “we are trying for his safe release and cannot provide any details about any [rescue] operation which more than likely will be carried out.”
